Role

Prof Assoc Volodkin is responsible for teaching at Undergraduate and Postgraduate level in a number of modules. He supervises Undergraduate and Postgraduate projects in the team Chemistry and Forensics. Prof Assoc Volodkin leads research in the group “Active-Bio-Coating”.

He is a module leader in the module Modern Day Materials and a personal and academic tutor for students of Year One and Year Two.

Career overview

Prof Assoc Volodkin has studied Chemistry at the Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russia, PhD in 2005. Later research stays brought him to France (University of Strasbourg) and Germany (Max-Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Technical University of Berlin) and in the year 2010 to the Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology (Potsdam) where he has established an independent group.

At the end of 2015 Prof Assoc Volodkin joined NTU. He has published more than 70 peer-reviewed articles, attracted ca 3 Million Euro research funding and received a number of prestigious scientific awards such as Sofja Kovalevskaja Award of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Richard-Zsigmondy Price of German Colloid Society, Alexander von Humboldt and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowships.

Research areas

Research activities in the group headed by Prof Assoc Volodkin focus on design of advanced stimuli-responsive biomaterials for bio-applications in drug delivery and testing, tissue engineering, regenerative medicine as well as other relevant applications where protection, localization in a confined space, and release on demand are required.

We design 2D and 3D structures which mimic and adopt natural cellular environment and can effectively host and protect bio-factors (e.g. drugs, nucleic acids, growth factors, proteins). The structures can deliver the bio-factors to cell receptors on demand (e.g. by variation of temperature, ionic strength, pH, light irradiation) with high spatiotemporal precision up to a level of single cell.

Researchers in the group engineer composite self-assembled structures with tailor-made properties and dimensions from nano to macro: delivery carriers such as capsules, beads, liposomes; polymeric scaffolds; planar and curved multilayers, etc.

The approaches developed in his group aim at both applications and fundamental understanding the key biological questions. One of our overall goal is to engineer artificial extracellular matrix (ECM) for understanding the dynamics of chemical and physical signals in real ECM. We address both basic and applied aspects in our interdisciplinary research by working in polymer, physical, colloid, and interface chemistry, as well as soft mater, nanomaterials, bio-engineering, etc.